Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 10:04 am 
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Surprises

Trailers make this look creepy, but it’s actually a touching and original movie, more surprising in its rather far-fetched premise than many another romantic comedy and another rare performance by Ryan Gosling (who when he’s good, is remarkable) as the titular Lars. Lars is a young man living in the garage of the big house in the north country he and his brother inherited when their widowed dad passed away. The brother lives with his wife in the house.

As the story begins, Karin (Emily Mortimer) and Lars’ brother Gus (Paul Schneider) are troubled by Lars’ behavior. He works in an office cubbyhole and comes home to the garage in his cheap car and never socializes. They have to literally tackle him and bring him to the ground just to get him to come to supper. Gosling keeps it geeky, but strikes a wonderful balance between shyness and strangeness so that right up to the film’s end, he seems real and unpredictable. What emerges is that Gus left home as fast as he could after their mother died giving birth to Lars, leaving the boy with his depressed dad, a situation that was bad for Lars’ socialization level, which is virtually nil. He doesn’t dislike people or being touched, he just can’t handle either. Karin is pregnant, and the idea of birth, given his mother’s demise, terrifies Lars too. The movie’s premise is that Lars can have a life, he just needs a little help. His odd transition into adulthood and having a relationship is through the bridge of an “anatomically correct” life-sized female doll he calls Bianca.

Knowing he needs a girlfriend, but quite incapable of dealing with Margo (Kelli Garner), the young woman at the office who’s interested, Lars takes a hint from his office mate and orders the expensive doll on the Internet. But he doesn’t use Bianca as the fantasy sex partner she was probably designed for. Instead he becomes delusional and believes she’s his real girlfriend, and introduces her to everybody, beginning with a dinner at Karin and Gus’s. Since Bianca, whom Lars soon begins taking around in a wheel chair, is a proper girl, Lars arranges for her to sleep in the pink room of the house while he remains in the garage.

Gus freaks. His brother is crazy, nuts. Karin urges him to calm down and deal with it. She convinces her husband they can’t change the situation and had better humor it. They contrive to have Lars take Bianca to Dagmar, the doctor (Patricia Clarkson, marvelously restrained here), for a checkup (Bianca’s allegedly had a rough trip from South America) which turns into weekly surreptitious therapy sessions for Lars in which Dagmar susses out the situation. Like the film as a whole, Dagmar never reveals or promises too much, but she leaves us quietly impressed with her wisdom and good sense in a tricky situation.

The whole little town goes along with the pretense that Bianca is a person, to the extent that Bianca becomes a hit, and volunteers at the hospital, and Lars becomes jealous of her independence. Eventually it emerges that this "mass hysteria," as it were, is a declaration of love for the essentially loveable Lars—which is the thing he needed to become a whole person.

The fascination of the movie is its own and its characters’ willing suspension of disbelief, which become a metaphor not only for fiction, for acting, and for movies, but for human sympathy and its power to induce love for people and from people we don’t understand. This is not just a study of one damaged individual on the mend, but of a whole little society. Delicacy in the writing and restraint by the actors makes this all work. While the story may seem simple and cute, and in some offbeat way it is, it’s also post-modern and self-referential: there’s something for everyone here, if you’ll just look. This hasn’t got the verbal wit and audience-pleasing nudge-nudges of such mainstream-hip current comedies as Superbad and Juno, but instead it’s got far more originality and subtlety—which may be surprising considering Gillespie and the writer, Nancy Oliver, come from TV backgrounds; but Oliver’s main credits, Six Feet Under and True Blood, aren’t exactly conventional and bland.

The delight of Lars and the Real Girl is that it never feels predictable and its key scenes don’t ever seem obligatory or routine. The movie is quietly absorbing and continually surprising, and those are rare enough qualities to make this quiet little story about healing one of the year's best American films.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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